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Facebook users may soon be able to stream, download and share music via the social networking site with a partnership with Spotify, a Swedish music service, according to codes found by software blogger Jeff Rose. The software engineer examined a code possibly in development that users could use to d...

To borrow from Shakespeare, many companies find themselves asking "to VDI or not to VDI?" The first step to determine if Virtual Desktop Infrastructure is the right solution for your company is to identify exactly what VDI means for your organization. VDI actually encompasses several types of delive...

Comcast, Cablevision, Verizon, AT&T and Time Warner Cable have promised to be more proactive in alerting possible copyright violators using their networks in a voluntary agreement with the music and film industries. The antipiracy model they've adopted has been pushed for some time by the Record...

I am not now -- nor have I ever been -- an online gamer. I've never even thought about sitting down in front of a Sony PlayStation, Microsoft Xbox or any other game console. And until a few days ago, I considered the idea of paying real money to buy virtual goods to spruce up ones surroundings in im...

Google's recent decision to abandon its Google Health program has raised new questions about how far the healthcare industry is willing to go down the cloud computing path. The reality is that Google's decision was not a reflection of the healthcare industry's resistance toward cloud computing, but ...

Amazon has announced three enhancements to its Cloud Drive and Cloud Player services, which launched earlier this year: a storage plan with unlimited space for music; free storage for all Amazon MP3 purchases; and iPad support for Cloud Player for Web. The Cloud Drive allows users to upload files to...

Most businesses with which I am familiar, especially those of small to medium-size, are so caught up in day-to-day challenges that the only time they take a good look at the health of their business and the timeliness of the filing and payment of certain taxes and levies is when they review their an...

I recently heard a couple of very interesting interviews on the radio -- both with Bernie Marcus, one of the original founders of The Home Depot. They turned out to be two of the most interesting and important interviews I have heard. Marcus said that government regulation has grown so out of contro...

A major round of funding from private investors for social networking site Twitter has raised the valuation of the company to more than $7 billion, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal. That's almost double from December, when it raised $200 million in a round of funding led by Kleiner P...

Retailers aren't investing seriously in mobile platforms right now, and who can blame them? Despite the lofty percentage growth cited by mobile shopping advocates, retailers privately lament anemic mobile conversion rates and report total revenue figures that can kindly be described as "modest." En...

Microsoft has forged a deal with Baidu, China's largest search engine, to provide search functionality in English. The deal comes a year and a half after Google exited China's search market with much fanfare, announcing it could no longer stomach the censorship the government applied. By the end of ...

The total value of mobile payments of all types worldwide will surge from $240 billion this year to $670 billion by 2015, Juniper Research predicts. This covers mobile payments for digital and physical goods, money transfers and near field communications transactions. NFC is the mobile payment techn...

When the U.S. government goes to the market for information technology, various contracting mechanisms come into play. In fact, as IT evolves, contracting follows, witness recent efforts at the General Services Administration to develop special procurement vehicles for both cloud technology and wire...

Succumbing to the primal pull of gameplay, millions of new consumers are joining the nearly ubiquitous adventure of exploring the pixelated worlds presented in video games, seeking personal recreation, relaxation, amusement, even escape -- and the industry is feeling the profound effects of that sta...

Last month, e-commerce giant Amazon made a foray into the flash sales marketplace. With European flash sales stalwart Vente Privee entering the North American market, and with the tremendous growth of U.S. flash sales players like Gilt Groupe and Rue La La, it's clear that the flash sales sector i...